Route proxy through VPN

[funarg]

Hi!

I'm evaluating WinGate as a proxy server that would use a Windows PPTP VPN connection as its gateway.
However currently in the 6.6.4 build the only options available on the Gateways tab are those of physical network adapters installed on the machine.

I also tried to use OpenVPN as an intermediary but apparently its virtual network adapters are also not picked up by WinGate.

Does anyone know if this is a supported configuration and if there's any sense in trying to invest more time in it to make it work?

Thanks.

[adrien]

Hi

what OS is WinGate running on? Normally PPTP connections just show up in WinGate as a dialup connection. Is the dialup connection showing in the network tab in GateKeeper? It may need to be enabled for use by WinGate.

Do you only want some traffic to go through the PPTP connection, or all traffic?

If all, just enable the setting in the PPTP dialup profile to "use default gateway on remote network".

Then all the traffic will go through the PPTP connection anyway, without requiring it to be set in WinGate.

Regards

Adrien

[funarg]

Hi Adrien

Thanks for your prompt response.

I'm running WinGate on Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) with ENS driver enabled.

My goal is to pass all regular trafic through WAN and use the VPN link only for stuff that's coming through the proxy.
So default gateway would not work in my case, I need quite the opposite - for VPN gateway to have the lowest priority/highest metric in the system.

The VPN connection does show in network tab as an Incoming connection, not Dial-up. Could this be an issue?

I'm attaching a screenshot where you can see the VPN at the bottom of Network tab.

Thanks.

[adrien]

OK.

There is a problem unfortunately with Gateway selection (the gateway tab) with dialup connections on Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 2008.

MS changed the way the TCP/IP stack works when there is dialup involved, and so gateway selection doesn't work with dialup on these OSes. The OS just fails the connection (wrongly). We bind to the IP of the dialup connection, and try to connect, and the OS fails it without trying (it's trying to be too smart and ended up being too dumb).

We view this as a bug in the OS, but we haven't had any response from MS when raising it.

So unfortunately I don't think this is going to work out for you in this scenario sorry, unless you can do the VPN connection from some other computer, and access that via LAN, in which case WinGate can select that other machine as a gateway fine, just not dialup.

Regards

Adrien

[funarg]

Ok, I see, thanks for the explanation.

I assume virtual NICs from OpenVPN or VMware won't work as gateways either, right?

[adrien]

actually we haven't had a problem with VMWare, not sure about OpenVPN, it may work.

Regards

Adrien